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Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Assange

Last December I stood with supporters of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange outside the Ecuadorean embassy. Young and old, they were there to demonstrate their solidarity with someone whose guts they admired. They were in no doubt about Assange's achievements and the dangers he faced. Absent entirely were the lies, spite, jealousy, opportunism and pathetic animus of those dominating coverage of Assange.

Like Jemima Khan, the film director Ken Loach lost bail money in standing up for Assange. The US is out to crush someone who has revealed its dirty secrets, Loach wrote. "Extradition via Sweden is more than likely … is it difficult to choose whom to support?

No, it is not difficult.

In the New Statesman recently, Jemima Khan ended her support for an epic struggle for justice, truth and freedom with a j'accuse that the Guardian also published. To Khan, the Loaches and countless others have all been duped. We are all "blinkered". We are all mindlessly "devoted". We are all cultists. Khan describes Assange as "an Australian L Ron Hubbard". She must have known that such specious abuse would make a snappy headline – as it did across the press in Australia.

One of Khan's complaints is that Assange refused to appear in a film about WikiLeaks by the American director Alex Gibney, which she "executive-produced". Assange knew that a film featuring axe grinders and turncoats would be neither "nuanced" nor "represent the truth", as Khan wrote, And that its very title – WikiLeaks, We Steal Secrets – was a gift to the fabricators of a bogus criminal indictment that could doom him to one of America's hellholes.

The sum of Khan's attack is that Ecuador granted Assange asylum without evidence. The evidence is voluminous. Assange has been declared an official "enemy" of a torturing, assassinating, rapacious state. This is clear in official files obtained under freedom of information, which betray Washington's "unprecedented" pursuit of him, together with the Australian government's abandonment of its citizen: a legal basis for granting asylum.

What is striking about Assange's haters is that they exhibit the very symptoms of arrested development they now attribute to a man whose resilience and humour under extreme pressure are evident to those he trusts. Khan refers to a "long list" of Assange's "alienated and disaffected allies". Almost none was ever an ally. Khan makes no mention of the damning, irrefutable evidence that Gareth Peirce, Britain's leading human rights lawyer, presented to the Australian government, warning that the US deliberately "synchronised" its extradition demands with pending cases, and that Assange faced a shocking miscarriage of justice and danger.

It is a red herring whether Britain or Sweden holds the greatest risk of delivering Assange to the US.

The Swedes have refused all requests for guarantees that he will not be dispatched under a secret arrangement with Washington.And it is the political executive in Stockholm, with its close ties to the extreme right in America – not the courts – that will make this decision.

Khan is rightly concerned about a "resolution" of the allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden. Putting aside the tissue of falsehoods in this case, both women had consensual sex with Assange and neither claimed otherwise; and a prosecutor, Eva Finne, all but dismissed the case. As Katrin Axelsson and Lisa Longstaff of Women Against Rape wrote: "The allegations against [Assange] are a smokescreen behind which a number of governments are trying to clamp down on WikiLeaks for having audaciously revealed to the public their secret planning of wars and occupations with their attendant rape, murder and destruction … The authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at will. [Assange] has made it clear he is available for questioning by the Swedish authorities, in Britain. Why are they refusing this essential step in their investigation? What are they afraid of?"